Software
Questions to ask
- what do meetings look like?
- how is mentorship viewed?
- what ratio of work is ticket-related? Is there an allowance of time to just learn new (somewhat relevant) things? how about time to do off-the-desk work, like writing documentation, or writing RFCs?
- Pagerduty?
- Timetracking?
- work/life balance?
- can you tell me a little about the financial state of the company?
- what is your and the team's philosophy on code reviews?
- workflow of tickets:
- who makes tickets?
- how are tickets assigned?
- how does code review work?
- how does code get merged?
- how does deployment work?
- How do you envision the structure of your ideal team?
- ex. everyone full-stack vs split of backend+frontend+infra
- how do you think about getting to that ideal level of collaboration amongst people on your team? How do you encourage collaboration, and how do you encourage cross-pollination of ideas so that the sum of parts is more than each individual?
- what is the team's philosophy towards testing? What percentage of components would you say are covered by tests?
- When a team takes a haphazard approach to testing, it becomes burdensome to add new features. Things break, and it often takes hours, days or even weeks to rectify the mistakes, taking away focus from developing the new features themselves. A team that doesn't embrace tests is destined to always be playing whack-a-mole, continuously figuring out what has gone wrong with their code.
Structured for email
- How is development work structured at the company? Does the team follow some incarnation of scrum? What kind of rituals would we expect to have (daily stand-ups, sprints, retro etc.)
- Somewhat of a follow-up to the previous question, what is the meeting culture like at the company? How is sync up made with teammates?
- How fragmented is team knowledge? On a scale of "each member is expected to be a specialist in their area" to "each member is expected to be a generalist for more or less the whole system", where would you place the expectation?
- Is there an on-call component, such as PagerDuty or something similar? If so, with what frequency does duty occur and for how long?
- How is work-to-be-done derived? Do we have product managers and designers who create goals? Do they work closely with developers?
30 second pitch (written)
As a mid-level software engineer, I bring a unique perspective to software development. I started my career as a UI/UX designer, but quickly realized the limitations of not knowing how to code. I taught myself front-end development and became the sole developer in a small local start-up. I then expanded my skills to become a full-stack developer, playing key roles as a system architect and database administrator. With a proven track record of being able to learn quickly and continuously improving my skills, I am able to quickly adapt to new technologies and understand how they fit into the bigger picture of the architecture. I like to see myself as the tide that rises all boats; A versatile and adaptable support team member who is able to jump in and perform a multitude of varied tasks as they present themselves.
Spoken
Ok, so my unique value perspective that I bring. I started out my career by doing UI/UX design. It didn't take long before I realized the limitations of not knowing how to code, so I taught myself front-end development. I took my first professional position as the sole developer in a small local start-up. From there, my curiosity got the better of me, and I expanded my skills to move more into the backend, becoming a full-stack developer. I joined another startup, and since no one else volunteered for the job, I played the role of database administrator and served as one of the principal system architects administrator.
Children